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Maybe you should take a break?

Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever posted anything related to these characters on here before? May need to go grab some of the older stuff for context. Either way, this is certainly a way to revive this dusty blog. You can thank every social media platform going through a wood chipper recently for that, I suppose.

These are two characters from a very long-standing DnD campaign. The one on the right is my own character, Verity Lapida Solaria, and the one on the left is @midnightwind's Nikolai Zepar. Assuming she sees this and deems it worthy of a reblog, I suppose her followers will now finally be able to see Nik's girlfriend in all of her glory, at least however much glory she can have while standing around in her pajamas.

This particular work features Nik copying spells into his ritual book from a recently acquired spell book. You probably couldn't tell that because I neglected to put anything inside either the book or the sheet of paper he was working on, probably because I would have made it glowy and wanted to do it after I had gone through and done the lighting and shading stuff, but I couldn't really bring myself to do anymore by the time I had done so.

The lighting and shading was particularly fun and insanity-inducing to do. I also ended up getting through it all without realizing my monitor was on its night mode setting the entire time, which minimized brightness. So uh, it'll probably be a bit weird for anyone viewing this on normal monitor settings. Oopsie.

Lighting is always a fun headache when it comes to Verity, because depending on what she's doing and how she's feeling, her hair can be a small light source (as it is in this image), or her entire body can just ignore the ambient lighting and appear as though it were the middle of the day, without actually giving off any light to affect objects around her. As you can imagine, these were qualities that I thought of while writing for her, not drawing her. Both are long stories that shall be saved for another time.

I won't claim to be particularly good at the whole light and shadows thing, but there's just something about pictures that depict a mostly dark scene with just a few small sources of light standing out that really appeals to me. It's a great vibe.

Anyway, back to the subject of the image itself, copying spells in DnD takes a very long time, something like one hour per spell-level. I like to think the process involves a lot of frustration as you have to get every little detail right and it's easy to mess up and have to start over. Nik spent a whole day copying spells over, so I imagine Verity coming back from whatever activities she got up to see Nik still working on this despite it being night time at this point. Nik is being a big grump (as usual), so Verity suggests taking a break.

This isn't an interaction that happened in-session, so there are a myriad ways the exchange might go down. Many of the ones I thought of involved Verity snuffing the candle by holding her breath (another long story), only for Nik to dryly point out that she'll have to breathe eventually, or that he can see in the dark, or that Verity herself gives off enough light for him to continue working, etc. etc. Another funny idea I had was a full on comic that I was never going to draw of Verity snuffing the candle, a panel of Nik's slightly glowy eyes turning to look at and squint at her, maybe a beat panel, and then the final panel of the light turning back on to Nik making out with her on the bed in the background that I didn't want to draw.

All of these options amuse me equally, so I decided to leave the image without any specific dialogue to serve as a fun little ignition for my own imagination.

As one final aside, I can't help but notice that the pictures I draw from this campaign rarely depict any moments of great importance. There's a few scenes that were great emotional moments, but most of the time I find myself gravitating towards drawing scenes like this that just show these two characters interacting in relatively mundane ways.

As you can see, I can't help but include a long rant about my creative process whenever posting my work to this site specifically. I'll cut this one here, but I'll go through my old stuff and (re)post it here with proper tags and talk more about Verity and Nik throughout that whole process. Feel free to look out for those posts if you care to know more.

#my art #Verity #Nikolai #DnD #my ocs #spell hell #take a break

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So this is an official announcement that I have started my transition and am currently taking hormones. The song seemed fitting. Originally I was going to release this when I had started, but it was a bit difficult to find time to record with work and the fact that my family is home 24/7 now with the whole plague thing happening. This is a grand total of four months and three days late, but better late than never, I suppose.

Cheers,

Nicole

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For you

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Birthmonth cover for @pandas-and-squirrels. Enjoy! 

This month was pretty rough on me, and my throat was not particularly fond of the idea of singing today, but I have lower standards for these covers anyway so we’re getting it DONE.

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Finally.

This has been like the slowest roast of any music I have created thus far. Considering I have a distinct memory of working on this back when I was in college, this song has been on and off the back burner for at least a year and a half. I believe the vast majority of that time was spent making no progress because I decided it would be an absolutely fantastic idea to have the song end with a guitar solo that lasted like 32 measures. Motivation to actually write that entire thing was hard to come by. Eventually, I dug it up while trying to figure out what to work on for Sound Off and finally managed to finish writing it.

The actual recording for this was also a bit of a chore. I’m still working on finding a way to record distortion guitar without it sounding overly metallic and, well, distorted. I have found out that the reason why it always sounds worse when recording is because I’m recording directly from the amp, and not the speaker. The speaker cabinet itself has a pretty big impact on sound, so I’m looking into how to replicate that effect digitally. Until then, I get to deal with the very noticeable distortion, especially when I try to play two notes at the same time. As difficult as it was to actually sit down and write a long guitar solo, actually managing to play the whole thing without accidentally holding down a string for long enough that it distorted the next note was a huge pain.

Anyway, now that this is finally done I can release Sound Off, which is gonna be for August and September. I’ve decided on the policy of not releasing a Sound Off if it would only contain a single cover, mostly for copyright reasons. Surmount ended up taking so long that I only got the Life in the Fast Lane cover done in August and did basically nothing else in September. Technically it’s October now, but it’s early enough that I can consider this part of September’s Sound Off, dammit.

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Too much allergies to properly clear my throat? Check.

Song that I’ve heard only very infrequently? Check.

Classic Rock Solos that rely on bends that are nigh impossible to do with a steel string acoustic guitar? Check.

Yeah this one was certainly something of an uphill battle. But hell, we gave it our best shot. Rather than learning the actual solos to the song, I just kind of noodled my own until I got ones that sounded like they kind of fit.

The full song is almost 5 minutes long, but the last minute or so of it is just one incredibly long solo instrumental. I was considering skipping it, but the deciding factor ended up being that I just kind of held the last note while recording the part before it, making a somewhat satisfying end. I believe my exact words were something along the lines of “Well there’s no more lyrics after this point, so, uh... fuck it I guess.” I believe at that point my fingers were getting pretty sore as it had been several hours.

I then left the project alone for a few days hoping my sore/congested throat would get better before the end of the month, but now it’s August 31 and it hasn’t happened so here we are. Funnily enough, I didn’t actually know any of the lyrics to this song aside from the chorus while recording the guitar parts, and when I came back a week later to record them I just looked them up and recorded them without actually listening to the song. As of the time of this writing, I have not gone back and checked how differently I sang the song, so for all I know the tune is a bit off. Consider that my own personal flair and not laziness.

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Finally decided to finish up one of the many originals that I’ve had on the back burner for a few months. Well, almost finish up, I may end up revisiting the guitar recordings to see if I can get a better quality recording. Things still seem to sound worse when it gets converted to digital, so I’ll have to figure out why that is and hopefully find a way to fix it so that it’s not over distorted.

This is an Underwrite song, and will likely be on the Underwrite Soundcloud at some point.

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I make my glorious return for the month of July, since June was a bit hectic with mmo expansions and out of state friends coming into state for a week. This is a birthday request for a friend who I don’t have the tumblr for (she probably has one, but at this point the only thing I use tumblr for is dumping songs).

I decided to add a drum track because this song doesn’t have particularly varied drum patterns and the rhythm is really hard to keep track of without them. Even then, the drum patterns are weird and I was having a hard time getting everything sync up properly, so a few things might sound slightly off.

I also used my dynamic microphone instead of my usb condenser mic. I hadn’t been using it for a few months because the interface for the dynamic mic tends to have recording dropouts more often than the usb, and I didn’t really know how to deal with the “changes in quality” I was experiencing between parts sung at different volumes on the dynamic mic. I was able to fix those up with my new condensing strategy, though I wasn’t able to fix the changes in vocal style. You will notice in this track that the choruses kind of lose the power at the beginning because I didn’t sing them with the same force as the lines leading up them.

I suppose it was only going to be a matter of time before a Set It Off song happened. They fall into a variety of genres, but always manage to have a unique unhinged feeling to their songs that’s really fun to listen to. Check them out if you haven’t already.

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Oh shit I’m late. Curse you, Spring Allergies! I shall have my revenge.

So yeah, on account of my throat feeling like shit for the latter half of this month, and my inability to stick to one project in the first half of the month, only one song this month.

I put an echo effect on one of the guitar tracks and now it sounds kind of like a harmonica in some places and I think it’s neat.

Also on account of my throat being crappy, I started messing with doing equalization on the vocal track. I actually took the original vocal track, copied it twice, cut the bass on both of the copies, and then panned them each to one side. I dunno if it’s really any better or worse, but it was a fun little component to this venture.

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Birthmonth request for a friend from college who I can’t tag because I don’t know her tumblr account lol.

This song has a hard-on for bar chords, which my stubby fingers are not a huge fan of. As simple as this song actually is, I am literally incapable of playing the whole thing in one go because my wrist and/or palm will give out by the time I finish the first chorus. If I ever get another acoustic guitar, I should probably get one with a different kind of neck to make bar chords less of a pain.

I was under the impression that my bass guitar was in some kind of disrepair, mostly since these acoustic covers have not really given me the chance to use it, and when I did test it out, it sounded pretty bad. However, I believe that may have just been the amp I was plugging it into. I have acquired for myself a new amplifier, one that has an output jack so that I can actually record without the mess of trying to set up a microphone in front of it. Anyway, new amp allowed me to record bass for this, and the actual bass part for this song was pretty simple, so I decided to throw it in there.

I’ll be honest, I was thinking of doing backing vocals for this. That was before doing 30+ takes of trying to hit notes that by all rights should be out of my vocal range. By the time I found the main vocals acceptable, I knew that my voice was at a place where any more attempts to sing wouldn’t really go well.

This is probably the last cover for April, on account of it being the 27th and I’ll be pretty busy tomorrow. I don’t have any close friends with birthdays in May, so this upcoming month will be a true test of my own initiative and will to get stuff done.

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About time I posted an original song, even if it is a bit of a repost.

Note: This song’s master volume is at 0dB. This is loud. Yes I know 0 doesn’t seem like it would be loud. It is. Tumblr doesn’t seem to have a volume control at the moment, (though I could have sworn they put one in a little while ago that you couldn’t use without also re-positioning the song), so please check your volume before listening if you’re using headphones. Alternatively, you can find (and download, if you’re into that) the song on my (second) soundcloud. I’d link it here but I’ve heard tumblr isn’t a fan of posts with links to other sites, so a link to my soundcloud(s) can be found in my blog description.

I was messing around in FL Studio earlier this month, since I wanted to do music stuff but my dad was trying to do taxes for my entire extended family and I didn’t want to disturb him. When I first uploaded this track, the entire thing was done in m MuseScore, which has limited controls for actual mixing. So I set off to recreate it with the much more powerful FL Studio. I’m pretty happy with the results to be honest.

I was going back and forth the entire time between overdrive/clean on the rhythm guitar. I eventually settled with the overdriven soundfont because I felt it held the energy of the song better. The soundfont has a long attack time (the volume peak is a little after the beginning of the note), so 8th notes end up sounding a little blurry or wobbly on account of reaching peak volume as they end instead of as they begin. I tried to avoid this, but I haven’t quite figured out how to mess with a soundfont in that manner just yet. I may release a version of this where the rhythm guiitar is clean, I just have to make some adjustments to some volumes, particularly with the bass. There’s a few parts in this current mix where the bass is probably a little loud, and that’s a lot more noticeable without the overdrive effect on the guitar.

Anyway, aside from those gripes, I really like how this came out, and hopefully you do too.

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Nobody will notice if I post this at 4:30 in the morning.

I’ve actually had this done for a few days but completely forgot to post it. On account of it being 4:30 in the morning, this rant will probably short. (Edit: After finishing the rant, it is not, in fact, short.)

This was done on my electric guitar, clean. Not really much to say there beyond some of the timings being off and whatnot. Having to record the lead part in parts due to dropouts and stuttering along with a lack of drum track will do that. I’m becoming pretty convinced that I need to upgrade my processor or something because my computer just doesn’t want to make it through a 3 minute recording without stuttering.

This wasn’t requested by anyone. At the beginning of the month, I was like “I should do a song with a female singer to set a baseline for my female voice.” On that subject, there’s quite a bit of difference between male and female voices, far beyond a simple change in pitch. For example, men typically emphasize via an increase in volume, while women will typically emphasize via a change in pitch. This is why a lot of men are monotone. This particular fact is also not useful for singing in a female voice, since pitch is kind of already a thing I have to control anyway. The key difference between male and female voices, and the hardest thing to control, is where in the body the voice resonates. Men resonate in the chest, while women resonate in the head. If you can master body resonance, you can sound like whatever gender you want without even having to worry about pitch. I can kind of get my voice to resonate in the head, but it tends to fall back down to my chest at the end of sentences. It’s also harder the more forcefully I’m talking/singing. Knowing this fact, your local dumbass proceeded to sing at max volume to make it as hard on herself as possible. That said, aside from a few instances of not being able to sustain a note and some volume cuts on account of my awful mic technique, I actually like the vocals on this one.

I have received a Paramore request for April, and Hayley Williams is basically my hero so expect Paramore stuff somewhat frequently. Being able to do a full cover of Let the Flames Begin + Part II is one of my goals for this whole music thing, though that’s a bit of a ways off.

This is the last one for March. I’ll conglomerate on Youtube when I wake up tomorrow. There is at least one birthmonth request for April, possibly two. Hopefully I’ll actually get around to at least one of the re-records of Now For Our Part and Aphonia, too. If not April, they should definitely be done by May, as I don’t know anybody with a May birthday.

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I can’t face the duck without you.

@midnightwind Happy Birthmonth, Caesar. *Looks at date* Finished just in time lol.

I tried several different things for this song. First I started with my electric guitar since I had just recently put new strings on it. After exhausting various combinations involving mic+amp/direct plugin, clean or acoustic filtering, and a whole lot of equalization adjustments, I eventually came to the conclusion that my electric guitar needs an action and relief adjustment and so just swapped over to the ol’ acoustic to do this.

I had to cut some of the bass off of the guitar recording because it was just way too prominent at the beginning. Like, hitting peak volume and vibrating your head kind of prominent. So I had a fun little adventure into proper equalization, a skill that I’ve been looking into this month.

It was a solid 75 degrees Fahrenheit outside when I recorded this and my home is currently geared towards heating for the winter still. Needless to say, it was hot, dry, and not particularly conducive to keeping my throat clear in my endless battle against congestion. I first tried singing really loudly since that was working well when I was in the shower, but alas, ‘twas not going to work in starkly less humid conditions.  So eventually I switched to just getting real close to the mic and singing softly. Probably a bit too close; I’m sure if you really listened carefully you could hear like, saliva sloshing about in my mouth or something weird like that.

I do believe that this is the highest I’ve sung in a cover posted here up to this point, with the possible exception of that one time I covered a Paramore song (more of those are coming in the very near future). I’m not going to go back and listen to it to confirm, because I did it two years ago when I was much worse at singing and had much worse equipment. I can’t handle that much cringe. As far as my voice goes, I can go higher, though you’ll notice that this is where I start to lose my vocal precision. We’ll work on it.

Speaking of working on things, you might also notice the beginnings of a feminine voice somewhere in the pre-choruses. I didn’t really intend to use a feminine voice for this but I guess I just kind of fell into it naturally, which is a nice possibility to consider. 

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doo doo DOO dadoo doo DOO dadoo doo DOO dadoo doo DOO

And the last one for February is done! Now I have... 3 days... to slack off!

I wanted to keep this one simple. Mostly because the song itself is pretty simple, but also because I wanted to see if I can get it done in one afternoon. It could be better, but that’s ok.

Still trying to figure out what the proper settings are for when I start yelling at this intensity. There does seem to be a noticeable drop in quality whenever I do it, and the audio is a lot spikier (as in, really high volume spike at the start of a note and then it goes down real sharply). This might just be my own vocal failings, though: I’m pretty quiet normally and I wouldn’t be surprised if I just can’t actually hold a constant loud volume due to lack of vocal strength. I think I managed to get the middle and ending choruses up to a proper volume through a mix of normalizing every note individually and using a compressor. The first chorus didn’t have the individual normalization so it’s not quite as well-balanced.

This song is hard to sing. I keep wanting to jump from a low to a high octave. I’m not sure if its just the way the harmonies in the original are mixed or if it’s just a vocal mismatch between me and the singer, but hot damn was it annoying to deal with. The other thing is without a drumbeat this song is really hard to keep time with, especially during the really long notes in the bridge.

Oh yeah, and I guess I’ll just @pandas-and-squirrels since you were the requester for this one.

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*Screams*

My initial process for making this was essentially:

-record the guitar track

-record the main vocals

-record the woahs

Things did not really work out in that regard.

The guitar track has a few duplications. Basically, when I was recording, my audio interface ended up sending a couple small sections of the audio twice in succession, where the second one overwrote what was supposed to be in that particular timeslot. If you pay attention to the guitar you’ll probably pick up on them. It’s a little jarring, but the duplications are still pretty much in time with the rest of the track, so I just kept them in rather than re-recording the whole thing.

I then moved on to the main vocals. Originally, I attempted to record the entirety of the vocals in one go, but I found that I couldn’t get through the whole thing without having dropouts, when small portions of the audio just don’t get recorded and throws everything else out of sync. Eventually I managed to get a recording with only one dropout during the actual vocals that I was able to repair enough to be usable. All I had to do after that was painstakingly split the rest of the audio and line it up with where it was supposed to be. By the time I finished that, I didn’t have any energy left to move onto step 3. A weekend break ensued.

So I ended up coming back to this like 3 days later. I did the woah parts. Then I did them again. And again. And again. Yeah there’s 4 of me singing during those parts. I like it.

After listening to the full track with fresh ears, I decided that I didn’t like the main vocal track after all, so I re-recorded it in parts as opposed to all the way through. It worked out much better, though the mic seems to do weird things when I sing particularly loudly. Ironically, all of the parts that are sung more forcefully seem to be a bit softer than the others. My current hypothesis is that the more forceful singing resulted in louder plosives, so the overall audio was not quite as loud compared to whatever hard b sound happened to be the loudest spike, resulting in most of the singing parts having lower amplitude when it was all normalized. Wow, that got a bit more technical than I intended to. Let’s move on before I start lecturing about my amateur understanding sound engineering.

Anyway, I then had to actually mix the volume of each track so there weren’t any sharp spikes in volume when transitioning from one vocal part to another. This didn’t take particularly long, but I had already put in so much work into this particular cover I figured I would go all the way and try to clean up the audio. I have a habit of putting a bit more force than necessary into my S, T and F sounds, so I went through and lowered the volume on all of those. There were a lot. I can recognize the audio patterns of those sounds on sight now. I have been scarred. I also did my best to remove any breaths that got picked up (pretty successfully, I’d say) and any plosives (gusts of air that hit the microphone and create a loud fwuh sound, typically seen in very loud Bs and Ps.). I have a pop filter to prevent these, though I’m still figuring out the correct position and orientation for it, so several plosives managed to get through. Some I managed to get rid of, others I had to keep because I couldn’t silence them without also cutting out a phoneme.

Anyway. I got one more cover to do for this set. Should hopefully be done before March, which will hopefully be the month where I get at least two new recordings out of original stuff (either re-recordings of my old stuff or some new stuff that I have written).

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@midnightwind

One down, two to go. Once I finish the other two covers in this set I’ll probably conglomerate them somewhere other than tumblr.

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So since I’ve been asked about it, I suppose I’m gong to make this clear. Some of you may or may not have noticed that I recently changed my pronoun preference on this blog. This is because I have recently come to the realization that whenever I mentally envision myself, it is as a woman. This was a month or two ago.

In that moment of realization I became quite convinced that I am a trans woman. After telling a close friend of mine and giving that identity a test run in secret for the past few weeks, I’ve felt considerably better about myself compared to the initial shock and frustration that I felt in the weeks after I had my big realization. The thing is, I don’t know how to interpret my now calm state of mind in regards to my identity, and where to go from here. Am I not experiencing much dysphoria because I have accepted who I am? Or is it because I am not as far on the other side of the gender spectrum as I originally thought? Do I want to change my body, or is the understanding of who I am enough? I haven’t really answered all of the questions yet.

I have neglected to announce this to you guys mostly because I didn’t have the energy or the will to find a good way to say it. Honestly, the pronoun section on my blog was only changed in a fit of whimsy while I was uploading one of the more recent songs, and I accidentally saved the changes to. Had I noticed before someone had seen it, I probably would have changed it back without a sound, but now I’ve given a few of you some cryptic bullshit like those annoying facebook posts, and I’m not going to just leave that unanswered.

So yeah, I will very likely confirm myself as a woman at some point in the future, when I’m more sure of myself, and I’ve seen a therapist and talked to my family about it. If/When that time comes, I’ll reintroduce myself. Until then, you can continue calling me Tom and using male pronouns. If you’d like to use female pronouns, or they/them, feel free to do so, it might help me figure out what I’m comfortable as. To those of you seeing this that know me personally, (which should be all of you, I’m pretty sure there are like 2 accounts I don’t know following me that are bots), you can feel free to pass on this post to our mutual friends who don’t use tumblr.

One last thing. This whole thing was in great part brought about by one of my close friends who asked me a question about how I identify a while back. I gave that person my previously usual answer of “I don’t really care how people refer to me; my gender has never been a big part of my identity.” This is still true to some extent, which may be a contributing factor to my uncertainty about this whole thing, but that’s not why I bring this up. That question pushed me to be more introspective and learn a great many things about myself, and I just want to let you know that I’m thankful from the bottom of my heart for that question and your friendship. You probably know who you are.

Anark, Sining out.